Top 38 SEO Interview Questions & Answers

1) What is SEO and introduce its types?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.

Two Types of SEO are:

1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization

2) What are the SEO tools do you use?

The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, keyword search, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.

3) What do you mean by Backlink?

 The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as Backlink.

4) What are out bound Links?

The outbound links are our website links to other webpage or website.

5) Can you tell me something about Googlebot?

To index a webpage Google uses the Googlebot software. Caching, Crawling and indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

6) What is Cross linking and what are the function of Cross linking?

1. Cross linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.
2. It provides the users with reference sites that consists the content related to the search.
3. It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods that have been built on the Internet.
4. It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search engine optimization techniques and methods.
5. The site ranking is calculated on the basis of the relevance of the sites and then it is reflected on the search engine.
6. It uses SEO tools that provide reciprocal links and inbound links that can be used as our SEO.

7) What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?

Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.

8) Can you mention the functions of body content relevance?

Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.

9) What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?

Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.

10) What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?

On doing search on your domain and if nothing appears then there are three possibilities.

1. May be the site is banned by search engines
2. May be no index by search engines
3. Some canonical issues

11)What is keyword stemming?

The process of finding out the root word from the search query is referred as keywords stemming.

12) Name some SEO blogs that you frequently read?

1. Jimboykins
2. Search Engine Land
3. SEOSmarty
4. MOZ
5. Search Engine Journal

13) What do you mean by Cloaking?

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing search. In this technique a different content will be searched by the search engine than what is presented or searched by the users.

14) How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?

There are two types Meta tags in SEO.

1. Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits
2. Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits

15) How many characters limits in Title tag?

We can add 70 characters in title tag.

16) What is Google Sandbox?

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.

17) Tell me something about Black Hat SEO?

In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.

18) Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?

1. Link Farming
2. Hidden text, etc.
3. Gateway or Doorway pages
4. Cloaking
5. Keyword Stuffing

19) Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?

Nofollow links are not passed by search engines bot and therefore cannot be cached or indexed. Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink and it passes through all search engines and it puts an impact over page rank.

20) What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.

SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.

21) Why the Title Tag in website is valuable?

Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what is there in the page.

22) What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?

Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although, building backlinks are useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.

23) Can you mention the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through Search Engine Result Page (SERP) , while to optimize the search result of your webpage or website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used.

24) What do you know about LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc.

25) How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?

To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of traffic.  The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

26) What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.

27) What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?

My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step

1. Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the key words.
2. Also, I would look for relevant key-words that can be helpful.
3. Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles and description.
4. If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might comprises     serious issues and re-work might be required.

28) What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google.  It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.

29) What is 301 redirect?

It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url . It is a permanent redirect and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url .

30) What are Webmaster tools?

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.

31) What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?

From SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

32) What is robots.txt? 

Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.

33) What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain?

The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

34) Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?

From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be    implemented.

1. Good Internal link structure
2. Generation of dynamic title and description
3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

35) What is the latest update in SEO?

The latest updates in SEO are:

1. Panda
2. Penguin

Bonus! 3 More!

36) What are the key aspects of Panda update?

Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

37) What are the key aspects of Penguin update?

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.

38) How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?
Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.

Google Console (Google Webmaster)

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is the primary mechanism for Google to communicate with webmasters. Google Webmaster Tools helps you to identify issues with your site and can even let you know if it has been infected with malware (not something you ever want to see, but if you haven’t spotted it yourself, or had one of your users tweet at you to let you know, it’s invaluable).

And the best part? It’s absolutely free. If you don’t have a GWT account, then you need to go get one now.

This guide to Google Webmaster Tools will walk you through the various features of this tool, and give you insight into what actionable data can be found within. (For more in-depth help, go to Google’s Webmaster Help.)

Verification

Before you can access any data on your site, you have to prove that you’re an authorized representative of the site. This is done through a process of verification.

There are five main methods of verification currently in place for GWT. There’s no real preference as to which method you use, although the first two tend to be the most commonly used as they’ve been around for longer.

• The HTML file upload. Google provides you with a blank, specially named file that you just have to drop in the root directory of your site. Once you’ve done that, you just click on the verify button and you’ll have access to your GWT data for this site.
• HTML tag. Clicking on this option will provide you with a metatag that you can insert into the head of your home page. Once it’s there, click on the verify button to view your GWT data. One item to note about using this method of verification is that it’s possible for the tag to be accidentally removed during an update to the home page, which would lead to a revocation of the verification, but reinserting the tag and clicking verify again will fix that.
• Domain Name Provider. Select your Domain Name provider from the drop-down list and Google will give you a step-by-step guide for verification along with a unique security token for you to use.
• Google Analytics. If the Google account you’re using for GWT is the same account as for GA (assuming you’re using GA as your analytics solution), is an admin on the GA account, and you’re using the asynchronous tracking code (with the code being in the head of your home page), then you can verify the site this way.
• Google Tag Manager. This option allows you to use the Google Tag Manager to verify your site.

The Dashboard

Now that you’re verified, you can log in and start to examine the data for your site.

The first screen you’ll see is the dashboard. This gives you a quick view into some of the more pertinent information for your site, along with any new messages from Google. We’ll cover each of the widgets shown here in their own sections.

Site Messages

When Google wants to communicate with a webmaster, this is the place they’ll do so. There may be messages that inform you that you have pages infected with malware, that they’ve detected a large number of pages on your site, which may be an indication of other problems, or even just an informational message that your WordPress installation really needs to be updated to remove the possibility of anyone exploiting already known security holes in that platform.

Not all messages are bad. There’s also the possibility that you’ll get one that congratulates you on an increase in traffic to one or more of your pages.

Settings

Clicking on the gear icon in the top right gives you access to the tools that formerly resided in the Configuration menu item.

Webmaster Tools Preferences

Here you can specify whether you’d like to receive a daily digest of your messages, and the email account you’d like them sent to.

Site Settings

Here you can tell Google some things about your site if you’re not able to tell them in other ways.

For example, if you have a .com site, hosted in Duluth, but it’s targeted to the UK, there aren’t too many signals to the search engines that that’s your intention. In this tab you can set your geographic target to the UK, which informs Google of your intentions for this site.

You can also set your preferred domain – whether you want the site to show up in the search results with the www or without the www. Most sites will redirect from one to the other, or contain canonical tags, which will preclude the need for setting this here, but if you don’t have that capability, this is your way to tell Google.

The crawl rate option allows you to slow down the rate of Google’s spider’s crawl. You’d only really do this if you witnessed server issues due to Google’s crawling, for the most part you’re going to let Google figure out what the correct crawl rate is for your site based on how frequently you add and update content.

Change of Address

If, on the rare occasion that you would do so, you decide to migrate your entire site to a new domain, this is where you let Google know.

Once you’ve set up your new site, permanently redirected the content from your old site to your new using a 301 redirect, added and verified your new site on GWT, then you come to this option and inform Google of the move.

This should help the index to be updated slightly more quickly than if Google were to just self-detect and follow the 301s.

Google Analytics Property

If you’d like to be able to see your GWT data in Google Analytics (GA), you can use this tool to associate a site with a GA account. Simply select any currently linked GA account to associate it with this site. Should you not have a GA account, you have the option to create one here.

Users & Site Owners

Here you can see a list of all authorized users on the account, and their level of authorization. A new user can be added here if needs be.

Owners have permission to access every item on the site.

Users with “Full” permission can do everything except add users, link a GA account, and inform Google of a change of address.

Users with “Restricted” permission have the same restrictions as those with “Full” permission plus the following: they only have viewing capabilities on configuration data, cannot submit sitemaps or request URL removals, cannot submit URLs, cannot submit reconsideration requests, and only have the capability to view crawl errors and malware notifications (they can’t mark any of them as fixed).

Verification Details

This lets you see any verification issues/successes.

Associates

This section allows you to associate different Google accounts with your GWT account, so that they can be designated as officially connected to the account/site. They can’t see any data in GWT, but they can perform actions on behalf of your site (e.g., creating an official YouTube account for the site, or posting to Google+ on behalf of the site through an associated account).

To add an associate user, simply:

• Click on the “Add a new User” button.
• Enter the email address that’s associated with the account you’re associating.
• Select the type of association you want.
• Click “Add.”

To associate a Google+ page, if it’s the same account on GWT and Google+, you’re done. If you’re using different accounts:

• Navigate to the Google+ page.
• Click on the profile button on the left.
• Click “About” in the links section.
• Add a link to the site.

Search Appearance

Clicking on the ? icon to the right of this menu option delivers a nice breakdown of the various elements of a search engine results page (SERP).

Structured Data

Here you can see information about all structured data elements that Google’s located on your site, whether they’re from schema.org or older microformats.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising SEM may incorporate search engine optimization(SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings.

Buying traffic through paid search listings:

SEM is a type of Internet marketing associated with the researching, submitting and positioning of a website within search engines to achieve maximum visibility and increase your share of paid and/or organic traffic referrals from search engines.

SEM involves things such as search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, competitive analysis, paid listings and other search engine services that will increase search traffic to your site.

Contrast With SEO

SEM is a broader term than SEO. Where SEO aims to provide better organic search results, SEM helps you successfully target users of search engines via advertising (paid) links in search results in addition to organic search to send targeted traffic to your website.

SEO and SEM are not competing services. SEO is considered a subset of SEM services. Today, if you want to conduct business on the Internet you need to be visible in both organic and advertised links, which means you need both SEO and SEM.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) Origins and implementation

According to technologist Danny Sullivan, the term "social media optimization" was first used and described by marketer Rohit Bhargava on his marketing blog in August, 2006. In the same post, Bhargava established the five important rules of social media optimization. Bhargava believed that by following his rules, anyone could influence the levels of traffic and engagement on their site, increase popularity, and ensure that it ranks highly in search engine results. An additional 11 SMO rules have since been added to the list by other marketing contributors.

The 16 rules of SMO, according to one source, are as follows:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content to "travel" via sharing
5. Encourage the mashup, where users are allowed to remix content
6. Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you (e.g., provide resources and information for users)
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate (join the online conversation)
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create new, quality content ("web scraping" of existing online content is ignored by good search engines)
11. Be "real" in the tone and style of the posts
12. Don't forget your roots; be humble
13. Don't be afraid to experiment, innovate, try new things and "stay fresh"
14. Develop an SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO a key part of your marketing process and develop company best practices

Bhargava's initial five rules were more specifically designed to SMO, while the list is now much broader and addresses everything that can be done across different social media platforms. According to author and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden, a Social Media Strategy is also necessary to ensure optimization. This is a similar concept to Bhargava's list of rules for SMO.

The Social Media Strategy may consider:

1. Objectives e.g. creating brand awareness, and using social media for external communications.
2. Listening e.g. monitoring conversations relating to customers and business objectives.
3. Audience e.g. finding out who the customers are, what they do, who they are influenced by, and what they frequently talk about. It is important to work out what customers want in exchange for their online engagement and attention.
4. Participation and content e.g. establishing a presence and community online, and engaging with users by sharing useful and interesting information.
5. Measurement e.g. keeping a record of likes and comments on posts, and number of sales to monitor growth and determine which tactics are most useful in optimizing social media.

According to Lon Safko and David K. Brake in The Social Media Bible, it is also important to act like a publisher by maintaining an effective organisational strategy, to have an original concept and unique "edge" that differentiates one's approach from competitors, and to experiment with new ideas if things do not work the first time. If a business is blog-based, an effective method of SMO is using widgets that allow users to share content to their personal social media platforms. This will ultimately reach a wider target audience and drive more traffic to the original post. Blog widgets and plug-ins for post-sharing are most commonly linked to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They occasionally also link to social media platforms such as StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Many sharing widgets also include user counters which indicate how many times the content has been liked and shared across different social media pages. This can influence whether or not new users will engage with the post, and also gives businesses an idea of what kind of posts are most successful at engaging audiences. By using relevant and trending keywords in titles and throughout blog posts, a business can also increase search engine optimization and the chances of their content of being read and shared by a large audience. The root of effective SMO is the content that is being posted, so professional content creation tools can be very beneficial. These can include editing programs such as Photoshop, GIMP, Final Cut Pro, and Dreamweaver. Many websites also offer customization options such as different layouts to personalize a page and create a point of difference.